Fatal Error

by J. A. Jance

  “Here, I think,” Flossie said. “Hand me the metal detector.”

  For several long seconds she ran it a few inches above the fine sand. Eventually it started alarming. “See there?” Flossie said. “I told you so.”

  She reached for the shovel, but Ali held it out of reach. “We can’t do this,” she said.

  “Yes, we can,” Flossie said. “I was raised on a farm. I was shoveling manure before I learned how to read and write.”

  “It’s not the digging,” Ali said. “It’s possible that this may be important evidence. If we disturb it in any way, and if Ermina Blaylock has committed a crime, our messing with the evidence might make it impossible for a district attorney to convict her.”

  Flossie stood stock-still. “Are you saying you think she’s done something wrong? I mean something really wrong, not just disrespecting her husband. You mean like something against the law?”

  “Yes,” Ali said, “that’s exactly what I mean, and I don’t want to be responsible for letting her get away with it.”

  “Neither do I,” Flossie said. “So what do we do?”

  “Get a rock,” Ali said. “A big rock that you can use to mark the spot so we can find it again.”

  Flossie nodded. “Okay,” she said, but she seemed disappointed.

  It took some time for her to find a suitable rock. Then Ali helped carry the equipment back across the road.

  “So what am I supposed to do now?” Flossie asked. “Just forget about it?”

  “No,” Ali said. “Not at all. It may take some time, but I’ll call it in.”

  “Are you some kind of a cop?”

  There were times when telling the truth was the only option.

  “No,” Ali said thoughtfully. “I’m no kind of a cop at all. I have a friend named Brenda Riley, at least I had a friend named Brenda. She may be dead, and I have reason to believe that Ermina is responsible for what happened to her. If that turns out to be the case, I want her caught and convicted.”

  “All right,” Flossie said in grudging agreement.

  “But there is something you can do,” Ali offered.

  “What?”

  “If I can make this work, a little later on tonight, a bunch of cops are going to show up here with a search warrant, and you can do them a big favor.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Show them where to find that clicker. It’ll be a lot easier for them to get inside the Blaylocks’ house if they can raise or lower the shutters.”

  “You think there’s a chance that bitch will go to jail?”

  “Yes,” Ali said. “I certainly do.”

  “Then you can count on me,” declared Flossie Haywood. “I will not let you down.”

  Ali waited only long enough to drive out of Flossie’s sight before she was on her Bluetooth and dialing Stuart Ramey. Yes, it was a holiday, but she had every confidence that Stuart would answer—which he did, once she managed to outwit the series of voice mail prompts.

  “Hey, Stuart,” she said. “I want you to look up a telephone number for me. The name is Gilbert Morris, Grass Valley, California. I have his cell phone and his work number. I’m looking for a home number.”

  “Have you tried information?”

  “He’s a cop,” Ali said. “I’m guessing it’s unlisted.”

  “That may take a little longer.”

  It turned out the number was unlisted and getting it did take a little longer. Wanting to be able to write down the number, Ali pulled over and parked in a small business park bustling with weekend campers on their way back to their respective cities at the end of the three-day weekend.

  “Okay,” Stuart said, “you called that shot. Here it is.”

  Ali jotted the home number down on the back of Ermina’s background check, right along with Gilbert’s office and cell phone numbers. When the phone started to ring, she held her breath.

  Answer, damn it! she thought. I don’t want to give you another chance not to call me back.

  “Hello.” He sounded tentative, uncertain. Before dialing his number, she had put in the code that would block her caller ID.

  “Is this Detective Gilbert Morris?” Ali asked. Her tone was brisk, businesslike.

  “Yes, it is,” he said. “But who’s calling, please?”

  “My name is Alison Reynolds,” she said. “I called earlier and left you two messages. You didn’t call me back.”

  “This is an unlisted number. How did you—”

  “Listen very carefully,” she said. “I have important information, but since you probably won’t believe me, I want you to call a third party. Do you have a pencil handy?”

  “I have a pen,” he said.

  “Good. The guy’s name is Laughlin. Detective James Laughlin. He’s a retired homicide cop from Jefferson City, Missouri. I want you to call him. Ask him about Ermina Vlasic Cunningham. Once you do, I believe you’ll be interested in calling me back. Here’s his number.”

  After reading off James Laughlin’s number, Ali hung up, without leaving her own number or answering any questions. When Gil Morris got around to calling her back—as she was certain he would—he could damned well go looking for her number. After all, she had already given it to him. Twice.

  46

  Grass Valley, California

  Gilbert Morris was pissed. He had no idea who had given this pushy broad his number but he intended to find out and then there would be hell to pay. This was exactly why cops had unlisted numbers—so every crazy in the universe couldn’t pick up the phone and give them pieces of their ringy-dingy minds just because they felt like it.

  His first instinct was to ignore it. She’d already told him that she was a friend of Brenda Riley. Yes, he probably should have picked up the phone and called her earlier today, but he hadn’t, primarily to get back at Chief Jackman more than anything else. He had told himself he’d make the call tomorrow. But now she’d had nerve enough to call him at home. On his unlisted number.

  But still, something about the call rang true. Who the hell was Ermina Cunningham anyway? And who was Detective James Laughlin? And what did any of it have to do with the price of tea in China?

  Finally curiosity got the better of him. He called the number. It was two o’clock in California. Four o’clock in Jefferson City, Missouri. A woman answered with an accent so southern that it sounded like verbal honey.

  “Yes, of course,” she said. “He’ll be right here.”

  “Jim here,” a male voice said a minute or so later. “Who’s this?”

  “My name is Gilbert Morris,” Gil said, feeling stupid. “I’m a homicide detective with the Grass Valley Police Department in Grass Valley, California. Someone suggested that I should give you a call and ask you about someone named Ermina Vlasic Cunningham. I’m not sure why.”

  “That’s odd,” Laughlin said. “That’s the second request I’ve had for information about her in as many days. Someone else was asking about her six months or so ago. Long story short, Ermina lived here for a few years with her adoptive parents, Lola and Sam Cunningham. Lola died. Sam supposedly committed suicide. I didn’t buy it then, and I’m not buying it now. I know, as sure as you’re born, that Ermina killed her dad but I’ve got no way to prove it. The inquest ruled Sam’s death a suicide. The daughter was never charged.”

  Gil knew what was coming before he ever asked the question. “How did he die?”

  “He was drunk,” Tom said. “Somebody put a plastic bag over his head and taped it shut.”

  “Holy crap!” Gil said. “And now she may have done it again!”

  He ended the call, opened the earlier message—the one he had ignored—and jotted down Ali’s name and phone number before calling her back.

  “Okay,” he said, “I talked to Laughlin. Where are you? What have you got? How did you make the connection, and are you a cop?”

  Disregarding all Gil’s questions, Ali asked, “Do you have a fax machine?”

  Gil glanced around his
clean but bare-bones living room. “Are you kidding? I’m at home. I barely have a microwave. Why?”

  “An iPhone maybe?”

  “Lady, look, if you’re looking for high tech, I’m not your guy. There’s a fax machine at the office. What do you want to send me?”

  “As I told you in my earlier message, Brenda was my friend. On Friday, just before she disappeared, she sent me an e-mail, requesting that I order a background check on Ermina Blaylock. That’s what led me to Detective Laughlin.”

  “You’re not a cop?”

  “No. Not for lack of trying. I made it through the academy but my department furloughed me due to budgetary considerations.”

  Great, Gil thought. An unemployed almost cop.

  “So what are you, then, a glorified PI?”

  “I’m not a PI, and I’m currently in Salton City, east of Palm Springs. I’ve just come from the home of one of Mark and Mina Blaylock’s neighbors. The woman, Florence Haywood, witnessed Ermina burning something in a barbecue grill bonfire in the early hours of Sunday morning. Later on, that same woman—sort of a neighborhood busybody—saw Mark Blaylock dump the ashes into a wheelbarrow and bury them. We used a metal detector to locate the site. It’s marked so we can find it again. Florence was all set to dig it up. I cautioned her that since this might be critical evidence, she needed to leave it as is.”

  Gil thought about that for a minute. “Salton City. What county is that, Riverside?”

  “Imperial,” Ali replied.

  “I’m a city cop. A Grass Valley cop investigating a crime that happened inside my city limits. There’s no way a judge is going to grant me a request for a search warrant in a county that’s half a state away from here so I can try to figure out who killed Richard Lowensdale.”

  “I don’t give a damn about Richard Lowensdale,” Ali told him. “I want to know what happened to Brenda Riley. As far as I’m concerned, those two cases are bound together, but whatever Mark Blaylock was seen burying, it isn’t on private property,” Ali replied.

  “It’s public property?”

  “Yes. It’s out on the beach. No one is going to require a search warrant to dig it up, but in order to maintain the chain of evidence, I need a sworn officer in attendance. You’re my first choice.”

  “Look,” Gil said. “I appreciate the tip, I really do. And I’d like to be there, but it’s not going to happen. I already got hauled into my chief’s office earlier today and bitched out for all the OT I put in this weekend. I was given a direct order to stand down. Based on that, I can’t very well go back to him now and say, ‘By the way, I need to take a four-hundred-mile side trip in hopes of picking up some evidence.’ Besides, even if he said yes, that’s at least a ten-hour trip, most likely longer today. There’ll be lots of people heading home after the three-day weekend.

  “I’m friends with a Nevada County detective named Frank Escobar. Since Brenda Riley’s effects were found in the county, he’s the one assigned to her possible suicide. Maybe he has some connections down where you are.”

  “The more people we involve, the more cumbersome it’s going to be,” Ali told him. “Did I understand you to say you’re off work today? That your chief sent you home?”

  “Yes.”

  “So do me a favor,” she said. “Give me the fax number for your department. There’s a general store here. I already checked. They happen to have a working fax machine. I’ll send you a copy of this report so you’ll have it in hand. I’ll also send you what I have on Richard Lowensdale. Once you read the fax, give me another call. By then maybe I’ll be able to figure out what our next move should be.”

  Our move, he thought. Right.

  But still, Gil had to admit he was intrigued. He had to look at one of his own business cards to come up with the fax number.

  “I need to shower,” he said, after giving it to her. “It’ll take me half an hour or so.”

  “All right,” she said. “Bye.”

  47

  Salton City, California

  The Salton City Pay and Tote was jammed with customers buying drinks, sandwiches, chips, snacks, and gas for their journeys home. Ali waited in line. When she turned over her stack of documents to be faxed, the harassed clerk shook her head.

  “All of these? Can’t you see I’m busy? This is going to take time.”

  Ali took a twenty from her purse and laid it on the counter. “That’s for you,” she said. “I’ll pay for the faxes separately.”

  “Okay,” the clerk said. “Just a minute.”

  It took more than a minute—lots more. The machine was balky. The first three attempts, it cut off after sending only three pages, and each time the clerk started it, she came back to the cash register to help the next person in line.

  While Ali waited, she used her iPhone to scroll through her e-mail account.

  During Ali’s years in California, as the wife of network executive Paul Grayson in a spare-no-expense era, she had made use of his company’s corporate jet connections on numerous occasions. Once the network started cutting costs and shedding “nonessential” personnel, the corporate jets as well as their pilots had been jettisoned at about the same time Ali had been kicked off the air.

  The pilots, most of them former military, were a good bunch of guys. Somehow a few of them had banded together with some other pilots, pooled their resources, and purchased a couple of the network’s stable of secondhand jets. They had used those aircraft to start their own charter service. In turbulent financial times and against all odds, they had started You-Go Aviation and were somehow succeeding at being the low-priced spread in California’s once-thriving private jet business.

  Ali wasn’t sure how her e-mail address had been added to You-Go’s customer mailing list, but she received frequent updates advertising their various specials, one of which was $1,995 an hour all in for charters flying anywhere in California, Arizona, and Nevada. Ali remembered from reading their corporate literature that from You-Go’s home base in Fresno, most flights could be done with a mere six hours’ notice where most other companies required a full twenty-four. When Ali dialed their operations center, she was hoping to take a big chunk out of the six.

  The young woman who took Ali’s call sounded dubious when she asked to be put through to Allen Knox, one of You-Go’s cofounders and a pilot Ali had known well back in the old days.

  “I’m sorry,” the call center clerk named Amelia told Ali. “Mr. Knox is our CEO. He doesn’t involve himself in day-to-day flight arrangements.”

  “This is urgent,” Ali said. “My name is Ali Reynolds. Please give him this number.”

  “Today’s a holiday. I may not be able to reach him, and even if I do, I can’t guarantee he’ll call you back.”

  “Just give him the number,” Ali said. “He’ll call.”

  And he did, less than five minutes later—just as Ali was paying off the faxing bill and reassembling her stack of paper.

  “Hey, Ali,” Allen said. “Good to hear from you after all this time. What’s going on?”

  “I’m involved in a possible kidnapping situation,” she said, fudging a little. “In order to maintain the chain of evidence, I need to get a homicide cop from Grass Valley to Palm Springs ASAP. How fast can you get someone from there to Jackie Cochran?”

  “Today?”

  “Yes, today.”

  “How many passengers?”

  “One.”

  “Luggage?”

  “He’ll most likely be traveling light.”

  “All right, Nevada County Air Park is a pretty short runway. Hold on. Let me see if we have a CJ1 available.”

  He put her on hold and was gone for some time. While she waited, Ali finished sorting and clipping her papers and bought herself a bag of chips. She needed something to soak up those many cups of Flossie Haywood’s Folgers.

  “You’re in luck,” Allen said brightly. “Our new CJ1+ just put down here in Fresno. The pilot’s still here, so we don’t even have to call
him out. He can refuel, file a flight plan, and be in Grass Valley in about an hour and a half. With ten minutes or so on the ground in Grass Valley, we should be able to have your guy on the ground in Palm Springs, about an hour and a half after that. So we’re talking three hours give or take. Will that work for you?”

  “That works.”

  “Let me put you back on the line with Amelia, then. She can take the passenger information and your credit card, give you the tail number and the address of Airpark Aviation, the FBO we use in Grass Valley. You haven’t flown with us since we became You-Go, have you?”

  “Nope,” Ali said. “This is a first.”

  “Well, I certainly hope it’s not the last,” Allen said. “Welcome aboard.”

  Amelia worked her way through the details in a no-nonsense fashion. Once they were ironed out, Ali called Gil back, on his cell phone.

  “Are you at your office yet?” she asked.

  “No, I’m still at the house. I just got out of the shower. I’ll be heading out in a few minutes.”

  “You might want to pack a bag,” Ali said. “You need to be at Airpark Aviation at the Grass Valley airport in about an hour. I’m sending a plane to pick you up.”

  “A plane?” Gil asked. “You mean like a Cherokee or a Piper or something—one of those little outfits?”

  “It’ll be a CJ1,” she told him. “A jet—definitely not a Piper.”

  “Do you mind telling me where I’m going?”

  “Jackie Cochran Airport outside of Palm Springs. I’ll pick you up there. Once you read the background material, you’ll understand.”

  “Great.”

  “One more thing,” Ali added.

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m assuming you’re armed. Don’t worry. Flying private, you’ll be able to wear your weapon on board with no problem. Just be sure you show up with government-issued photo ID. And if you happen to have a couple of Kevlar vests lying around, you might want to bring them along. One for you and one for me. I wear a size large.”